~ insanitybytes

Two Worlds

I watched one of those tourism videos about the place I live, the quaint shops, the famous people who visit, the history, the beauty all around us, and while all these things are true, my cynicism soon began to kick in and I so wanted to make a video of my own. The other side of the story, the wrong side of the tracks, what life is actually like for 80% of the people struggling to survive here.

Everybody has these videos, right? The one’s that say come visit us, come to paradise……bring your money. We’ve been busy gentrifying the area for some time now, so people see the facade, the fun, the retirement potential, this thin veneer laid over the truth and reality of most people’s lives that I so want to poke big holes in.

I question my own motives sometimes, I wonder why this all matters to me, what I want people to see and why, and part of it is because I don’t think people really understand how significant the gap between the rich and the poor really is, what it looks like in America.

People actually live without running water, without electricity, with tarps on their roofs, whole families packed into campers, tents. People often don’t have enough to eat. Working people, people with paychecks, still barely able to survive. Go to the city and I can show you the same, extension cords running down the hall, the one shared outlet powering three apartments, the toilets not working, how we wash dishes in the bathroom because the kitchen drain goes to nowhere.

It’s not really about money, it’s about this gap, this disconnect, what it feels like to be left behind and forgotten. Completely invisible. What it’s like when you do everything right and yet you still can’t get out, you can’t escape this trap you’re in. All around are all the others who seem to have figured it out, so it must be you. You must be doing something wrong.

It’s not really about the money. I say that a lot actually, and I guess what I mean is that you can’t just throw money at it and make it all better. It’s not a money problem, it’s a heart problem, it’s a spiritual issue deep within this country. Injustice, I feel that sense of injustice just screaming out at me, an idea, a concept that has evolved into the popular notion of “social justice.” People starved for justice, without even really knowing what “justice” is, what it really means. What it would even look like if justice ever showed up? I get it though, I know what it is like to always be on the receiving end of injustice.

Nancy Pelosi of all people, said something last week that really stuck in my craw. She said with all due horror, “You want grandma living in the guest room? You repeal the Affordable Care Act.” What’s the greatest horror Americans in Pelosi’s world could ever face? You might have to look after your own Grandma.

What’s it like to be that Grandma? That unwanted house guest? A woman so unloved, so despised, we’ll move heaven and earth, we’ll spend billion of dollars keeping her out of our homes. We’ll petition congress, we’ll pass laws, we’ll build gated communities, we’ll do whatever it takes to keep THAT woman firmly on the outside looking in.

We don’t want to “help” grandma, we don’t want to have to love her, we want to make darn sure she never winds up in our guest room. And grandma, does she sense the injustice there, does her heart cry out like mine does?

That is the essence of the heart behind the cries for social justice. Somewhere in our spirits we know we are owed something, that something has been stolen from us. Our humanity perhaps. We’re all Pelosi’s grandma now, that unwanted house guest.

Very well said IB. It is a heart issue for sure, especially when you look at how much our society prizes convenience and upward mobility at the expense of people like a sick grandmother who needs care.

Income inequality will always be with us to some extant, it can’t not be in a free society. The extreme we see now though is not normal and is negatively affected by bad legislative policy that has priced the lower class out of the job market and dramatically boosted the cost of housing, energy and food.

I don’t mean to inject politics here just to be a jerk, but it so profoundly irks me that people like Ms. Pelosi implement policies that are just devastating to low and middle class families, yet goes on to claim to be some sort of champion for the under dog. The woman is delusional but unfortunately 3/4 of the voting population in Francisco is too so she will remain in power probably until she dies.

Some other West Coast politicians like Pelosi have proposed forcing landlords and property owners to allow homeless bums free access to unused buildings and properties. It just shows how sick Liberals are: they’re horrified at the idea of taking care of family but think it’s noble to let bums shoot heroin on your front porch and defecate in your back yard.

What irks me is the attitude of entitlement that pervades our culture and our politics. The obvious connection is the voting in of people like Pelosi or Obama or even Hillary Clinton. (Although she didn’t win this last highest bid she put in, a huge number of people voted for her.) it is maddening that people vote for the financial destruction of so many of us while deluded into thinking they are doing the opposite. But it’s much more personal and real and direct even than being personally damaged by the bad economic policies. It’s throughout our schools and our court systems and everywhere our lives touch day in and day out.

It’s not just a spiritual disconnect between the rich and the poor! It is a spiritual disconnect between people and themselves and their closest neighbors and reality! How can the teachers at the schools watch their students fa,iLife’s struggling to survive en turn around and set up more and more school fees and rant and scream that they are owed more money because they are too good to have any struggles in their finances? How can people claim to know it’s rough all over and be voting for the government to raise taxes and inflation and take over certain areas of life while feeling great about tripling the health insurance rates of cancer victims and young adult students with Asperger’s syndrome who are falling through the cracks trying to make ends meet. And how can that same voter continue on and on expecting that the cancer survivors and the young Asperger’s man owe them their college education and that anyone not smart enough to set their life up as that voter likes to see it with cell service and easy everything deserves their disdain and to have their pic posted and mocked as people of Walmart?!

How can a judge sit in a courtroom looking at an adulterer who makes 100,000 per year and who recently took his mistress away on vacation, hear that he cut the Internet off despite her restraining order telling him not to, on his 16yo so that she can no longer use her online math tutor, do her online Italian lesson, or utilize the year long anime subscription that he got her for Christmas because he felt he only paid for it for her older sister’s schooling, then look at the 13,000 per year wife who tried to devote herself to being a wife and mom at home, who homeschooled their children, was a stay at home mom for 15 of the 19 years of their marriage and only worked for a year or two way back when he got himself fired for his bad attitude and again in the last two years when she saw he was self-destructing with being drunk for over two years nearly continually, and ream the wife in court for needing to make it work with 18,000 a year plus temporary mortgage for a few months and how dare she have not budgeted that internet in while paying for the 19 yo to go to college, helping the 25yo and his wife and children who had recently become homeless, and paying the expenses of the alternative wellness diet and supplements that made the 16yo able to overcome ADD that never responded to medication, and how dare she think he who had a restraining order against him from that same judge to not quit paying any expenses he was already paying should not quit paying that one?

I could, of course, write a million more details of the crazy of that case and the expectation placed on that situation while that adulterer, after enjoying the judge’s tantrum toward the wife, stopped paying everything but the mortgage altogether for several weeks, then paying and getting credit for paying for the next several weeks from the child support enforcement agency while also stealing the money back out of the bank account until after months of keeping them cut off from all financial support he’d added his crime status up to stealing over 6000 from his daughter, all the while threatening the wife with knowing the judge clearly thought little of her and that he and his amazing mistress would soon be raising that teen since the judge knew she’d be better off in their den of debauchery. But while judge J is clearly committed to paths of unrighteousness, justification of all current or past or future immorality and all past and current emotional abusiveness, and wholeheartedly willing to further the causes of foolishness and injustice, she hasn’t actually said a word about forcing the teen who refuses to see him and alleges he is an emotional abuser and a drunk to go live with him and his harlot. So we are just struggling along letting go of the diet and helps that have made us more functional human beings and living as a household of 7. But we have Internet! It’s not all bad to have it. At least I can easily get her to keep doing her Italian and her one good math tutor. With one of the 7 in college and another soon to be, I’ll do everything in my power to do to keep everyone going until the creditors haul me off and have me committed.

The pervading sense of entitlement and of how everything in life is supposed to be, and that everyone not fitting into the perfect picture we paint in our heads of an normal life, is full of holes and foolishness and sin against ourselves and our neighbors. I sometimes think most people need to be sentenced to being utterly cut off from the electronic world and pop culture and then filmed trying to live a life of having to be present in their local reality 24/7 until they end up adjusted back to reality. But I fear that many of them would rather end up dead or committed to an old-school mental hospital than to actually deal with reality.

Vent away, my dear! Seriously, I hear you and all that stuff really will make you crazy, so speak about it, talk about it, get it off your chest. Walk, write, yell,whatever it takes.

I walk a lot. There’s an old joke, after five minutes of walking you forget your troubles,after ten minutes you forget who you are,and after 15 minutes you forget where you live. Once you forget who you are and where you live, life starts looking pretty good. 🙂

Walk with Lord, rest in His peace, invest in yourself, seriously, because all that nurturing and giving your all in the midst of craziness and injustice can leave you depleted and half nuts. Refresh, renew your spirit, let God carry you.

Grandma, I only knew her as a young boy (dad’s mom passed before I was born), but I would have loved to have had her around longer. Sad how one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor, the SAME timbers creating both. Jesus said. “the poor you shall have always with you”. So, it should be quite obvious that money – no amount of it – will ever remedy the ‘problem’. But should our perception of it be as a ‘problem’?

Trials are part of life, purposed by God to ‘squeeze’ out the best in us, thus revealing a visible manifestation of His love and compassion. But giving to the poor monetary substance, although altruistic, does not provide a lasting remedy – nor does God intend it to. Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, you feed him for a life-time. Jesus passed by many beggars because the ‘made their living’ begging, NOT wanting a positive life-changing remedy – only food for today.

I consider myself quite charitable. I tithe, I support legitimate missions, I even ran a food bank for my community for several years. But I have NEVER given a dime to beggars on the street or holding signs on street corners. Why? Because THEY are the ones Jesus passed by. True charity is to help improve life, NOT perpetuate low-life.

Don’t get me wrong. I have considerable compassion for those less fortunate. But on the other side of the same token, I have little tolerance for repeat offenders. That’s a decisive (and divisive) difference between me and the ‘bleeding hearted extreme liberals that seem to have swapped scriptural integrity with political correctness. Naturally, their programs and agenda offend me. Every time I ‘squeeze’ them, only arrogance and intolerance gushes out.

Grandma would have simply shook her head and told me to pray for them, even though they would not want to care for her. Perhaps Nancy Pelosi should look in the mirror. Obviously, her ‘time’ is coming – much sooner, than later. Or maybe she bought into the ‘immortal’ state of progressives that makes them so haughty.

Your words remind me of Peter 3:6 when encountering the beggar, “Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.”